Vladimir Malanin

Vladimir Malanin: Twenty-Three Years, One University

In March 1987 the staff of Perm State University chose their own rector. It was among the first such elections held anywhere in the Soviet Union — and reportedly the first in Russia — and the man they chose was a 44-year-old specialist in the mechanics of controlled systems who had started his education qualifying to cut cold metal at an oil technical school in Kungur. Vladimir Malanin held the post for twenty-three years, through the collapse of the state that had employed him and everything that came after.

From the Kungur Metal Shop

He was born on 30 August 1942 in the village of Sylvensk, in the Kungur district of the Perm region, in the middle of the war. His first credential, taken in 1960, was a technical qualification in cold metal processing from the Kungur Oil Technical School — a working trade, in a region whose economy ran on oil and machinery.

That same year he entered the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics at Perm State University, and it turned out he had been under-placed. He was one of the faculty's strongest students; in his fifth year he was sent on an internship to the equivalent faculty at Moscow State University, the summit of Soviet mathematical training. He graduated with distinction in 1965.

Rodrigues, Hamilton, and the Attitude of a Rocket

He stayed. His candidate's dissertation, defended under I. F. Vereshchagin, was titled "Some questions of the study of the process of launching an aircraft to a given program" — the mathematics of getting a flying vehicle to follow a prescribed trajectory. He took the degree of Candidate of Physical and Mathematical Sciences in 1970 and became an associate professor in 1971.

The problems he worked on for the next forty years sat at the junction of pure kinematics and practical control. Describing how a rigid body turns in space is deceptively hard: the obvious coordinates break down at certain orientations, which is why engineers reach for Rodrigues–Hamilton parameters (quaternions, in another vocabulary) and Cayley–Klein parameters instead. Malanin's work developed methods built on both for describing motion. Around that core he ranged across computer algebra, mathematical modelling, solid mechanics, the optimization of aircraft flight control, and the behaviour of dynamical systems — specifically, complex dynamical systems including stochastic ones, where the disturbances acting on a body are random rather than known.

The output is large: more than 440 publications, of which 139 appeared in the specialist press, along with ten monographs, five university manuals, patents and registered databases. He took a scientific internship at the Sorbonne in 1976–77 and another at Oxford in 1999. He was made a professor in 1991 and took a second doctorate, the Doctor of Technical Sciences, in 2001 — after fourteen years as rector, which says something about how he regarded the day job.

The Department, 1975–2011

From November 1975 until 2011 he headed the Department of Mechanics and Control Processes. Thirty-six years at the head of a single department is a career in itself, and it overlapped almost entirely with the administrative one: vice-rector for scientific work from 1983 to 1987, then rector from 1987 to 2010, then university President from April 2010, all while still running the department and supervising its research.

Rector Through the Collapse

The timing of the 1987 election is the whole story. Malanin took charge of a Soviet university and, within four years, was running a Russian one. Everything that funded, staffed and justified the institution changed underneath him: the ministry, the currency, the students' expectations, the reason for the university to exist at all. He was re-elected in 1992, 1997, 2002 and 2007, and stepped down on 15 January 2010, at which point Perm State National Research University made him its President.

He was also the region's convener. From 1996 to 2017 — twenty-one years — he chaired the Council of Rectors of the universities of the Perm region, and he sat on the Council of the Russian Union of Rectors. He remains a member of his university's Academic Council, its Board of Trustees, and the board of its endowment fund.

The Public Man

The honours are the standard Russian ladder, climbed thoroughly. A Certificate of Honour from the Presidium of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet in September 1992. The medal "Veteran of Labour" in 1990. Honoured Worker of Science of the Russian Federation in 1995. The Order "For Merit to the Fatherland," fourth class in May 2000 and third class in July 2008. Honorary Citizen of Perm on 22 May 2012, and Honoured Professor of Perm University in 2015.

He was also visibly political. He served as a *doverennoye litso* — an official trusted representative — for Vladimir Putin in the presidential campaigns of 2000, 2004 and 2012. He chaired the Public Council of the Perm Krai police from 2010 to 2013 and sat on the Perm Krai Public Chamber from 2010 to 2015.

Why Vladimir Is Called a Genius

Honesty first: no source consulted here applies the word to him, and it would be a stretch. Malanin is a capable applied mathematician whose research sits inside a well-established tradition — the Soviet school of analytical mechanics and control — rather than overturning it. The parameters he worked with are named for Rodrigues, Hamilton, Cayley and Klein, not for him. His four-hundred-plus publications reflect a long career and a large department as much as individual force, and his highest distinctions are civic and state honours rather than scientific prizes.

What he demonstrably has is a rarer administrative faculty, and it is worth naming precisely rather than dressing up. He was handed a Soviet institution in 1987 and had to keep a research university funded, staffed and coherent while the state that had defined it dissolved. Twenty-three years and four re-elections is not a fluke; his own faculty kept choosing him. Running a department for thirty-six years simultaneously, and taking a second doctorate in the middle of it, argues for extraordinary stamina and an unwillingness to become purely a manager.

The counter-case has to be stated too. Long tenure in Russian higher education is not purely a merit signal; institutional survival in that period was bound up with political alignment, and Malanin's three turns as a public endorser of Putin belong in any honest ledger. Endurance and adaptation are real skills. They are not the same thing as intellectual originality, and the record does not show the latter.

Legacy

The institution he ran is now Perm State National Research University, one of the leading universities of the Urals, and he still sits on its councils as President. His mark on it is structural — three decades of continuity across the single sharpest discontinuity in modern Russian history. The mathematics will be remembered by the specialists who use it; the university will be remembered by everyone in Perm.

Achievements

• Medal "Veteran of Labour" — 1990
• Ushinsky Medal
• Held posts at Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of Perm State National Research University and Perm State National Research University
• Fields: computer algebra, mathematical model and mechanics